Suggested Reading List
Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas
Author: Rebecca Solnit
Description: What makes a place? Infinite City, Rebecca Solnit's brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas, searches out the answer by examining the many layers of meaning in one place, the San Francisco Bay Area. Aided by artists, writers, cartographers, and twenty-two gorgeous color maps, each of which illuminates the city and its surroundings as experienced by different inhabitants, Solnit takes us on a tour that will forever change the way we think about place. Across an urban grid of just seven by seven miles, she finds seemingly unlimited landmarks and treasures--butterfly habitats, queer sites, murders, World War II shipyards, blues clubs, Zen Buddhist centers. She roams the political terrain, both progressive and conservative, and details the cultural geographies of the Mission District, the culture wars of the Fillmore, the South of Market world being devoured by redevelopment, and much, much more.
Historic San Francisco: A Concise History and Guide
Author: Rand Richards
Description: This combination history/guidebook is divided into ten chapters, each of which provides background information on San Francisco's historic buildings, museums, and artifacts. Profiles of sites or attractions include hours of operation, costs, and a quick biographical sketch of a key figure. Four walking tours, a brief review of the sites, a chronology of events beginning with 1542, a discussion of San Francisco's Victorian architecture, and a review of the earthquake of 1989 are also included.
San Francisco: The City's Sights and Secrets
Author: Leah Garchik
Description: Discover the beauty of San Francisco, its hidden charms, and its well-loved sights in this unforgettable photographic tour. Some of San Francisco's most renowned photographers, including Bill Hanapple, Don Kellogg, and Tom Tracy, have captured new perspectives of the City with spectacular images of its most celebrated landmarks, from Coit Tower and the Transamerica Pyramid to lesser-known but equally beautiful features, such as the flower-lined Filbert Street steps and the charming alleys of Russian Hill.
San Francisco: A Photographic Portrait
Author: Brad Perks
Description: San Francisco: A Photographic Portrait is a coffee-table keepsake of high-quality, full and half-page, color images of the city and surrounding Bay Area. Its photographs depict the diverse personality of this "City-by-the-Bay". The citys commitment to its historical roots as well as the future is captured in images of both turn-of-the century and contemporary architecture; parks comprised of hillside trails and wildflowers as well as elegant theme gardens, and the cultivated vineyards of the Napa Valley are represented throughout the book.
Making San Francisco American: Cultural Frontiers in the Urban West, 1846-1906
Author: Barbara Berglund
Description: The San Francisco that rose from the ashes of the 1906 earthquake and fire was a city of rigid social stratification--a city determined to contain its diverse and disorderly rough-and-tumble past some sixty years after its acquisition by the United States.
Barbara Berglund vividly describes San Francisco's rapid evolution from Mexican outpost to crown jewel of America's western empire, taking readers back to an earlier and more chaotic time when class definitions and social conventions were much more fluid. Berglund argues that the city's rapid rise from a multicultural boomtown to a racially and socially stratified metropolis reflected the careful efforts of a nascent elite to order its inhabitants through political and cultural means.
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